Thanks for the good encouragement! I'm just going keep plugging away at resumes and cover letters.. you never know - I might just get lucky. I hope you're right about schooling stuff.. If my education puts me where its supposed to - I'm going to be in a cubicle programming COBOL for the next 35 years.. I sure hope I'm not!

I'll definitely take a look into a few books too - I love to learn this stuff and now that I have a good grasp on programming in a Win32 environment, hopefully I can understand and even implement a few concepts.

I just wanted to say that I appreciate you going out of your way to answer me... it feels frustrating sometimes, and it gets the best of me.. I've been out of college for like a month and I've been applying for all sorts of systems programmer jobs for the last year and despite being top of my class, I'm getting turned down everywhere just because I don't have enough experience. I guess that's what life is all about.

Anyways, thank you for the encouragement.

Btw: I have a C++ rpg (about the same programming level as final fantasy 5) I worked on for a good 4 months for fun in my last year of school - do you think if I finished, optimized the code, fully tested, and made it available online that it would help my chances? (as sort of a portfolio or something)